Mortality catches up with Big Apple

New York's terror attacks not only ruined a nation's financial hub, reports ROGER FRANKLIN, it wrecked office space and worker confidence as well.

NEW YORK - In her book On Death and Dying, psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross laid out the five stages that every terminally ill patient must go through.

The initial reaction, wrote the woman who found a lucrative vocation in mortality, is a combination of shock and denial. After that, as the doctor's grim prognosis strikes home, comes anger, followed by depression, and then a hopeless attempt to bargain with God.

Finally, when the possibility of divine intervention has passed, there is surrender or acceptance.

What brings Kubler-Ross to mind is not the constant reminders of death that are everywhere these days in Manhattan, a city where the tattered pictures of those butchered on September 11 still rustle on every wall and lamppost.

Nor is it the ads for the "grief counsellors" plying their grim trade in church halls and hastily rented professional suites. No, the spell that resurrects Kubler-Ross is this city itself.

As Bronx politician and mayoral hopeful Freddie Ferrer put it the other day in his self-serving way, this town is a living organism that has sustained a grievous wound.

Since this is primary season and the Democrat Ferrer is facing a runoff election to secure his party's nomination before the final contest with Republican Michael Bloomberg next month, the sub-text could not have been more clear: Vote for me, for only I can make the pain go away.

Indulge Ferrer's ego for a moment. Don't dwell on his ludicrous assertion that the destruction of the World Trade Center and more than 6000 innocent lives is somehow comparable to the rash of petty arsons and insurance scams that turned his South Bronx bailiwick into a moonscape of desolation. When all is said and done, Ferrer is just another politician and thus subject to all the egomaniacal conceits of his kind. It is the metaphor rather than the messenger that makes an impression, his invocation of New York's human spirit.

If you accept it, if you buy his analogy of the Apple as a flesh-and-blood entity, then the question is twofold: is the city mortally stricken and, if so, just what point on Kubler-Ross's timeline have we reached?

Ferrer, like incumbent Mayor Rudy Giuliani, would deny that the wounds are fatal. Though they detest each other, both epitomise that American archetype "The Booster" - the sort who place hype at the service of what they see as the greater good. Were it not for that brassy breed of glad-handing smooth-talkers, much of America would still be in the hands of the Indians.

But when you move beyond the feel-good blandishments, well, it's difficult to resist the dour view that, whether the city's backers like it or not, New York's days as the new Rome may be coming to an end.

How so? Consider the simple logistics.

When the twin towers came down, Manhattan lost 10 to 20 per cent of its available office space. Many of those dispossessed tenants are making do with temporary digs in Silicon Alley, the southern strip of Midtown formerly occupied by a host of recently deceased dot-coms. Others, however, have fled, leasing vast amounts of floor-space in the satellite suburbs that surround Manhattan in a ring from waspy Connecticut to grungy New Jersey and plebian Yonkers.

Some may return, bringing the lost jobs with them, but the chances of that happening are not good.

"Some of the firms that are now in New Jersey or somewhere else are going to enjoy lower costs there and stay," said Samuel Zell, a property tycoon who operates a roster of trophy buildings across the US that includes Chicago's Sears Tower. "They might never have moved before, [but] once they've moved, I don't know whether they're ever going to move back."

As for re-building the World Trade Center, there is a growing consensus that it is not such a good idea. Think about it: while the rubble will be eventually cleared - it may take a year or more, but all 160 million tonnes of it eventually will go - who would want to spend another $7 billion to build another target for terrorists? Even more to the point, what clerk or accountant or stockbroker would risk life and limb to work there?

If those jobs go, residential real estate will likely founder as well. Only last week the New York Times reported the first signs that just such a collapse is already under way. Buyers who had put down deposits of $80,000 on apartments were surrendering down-payments and tearing up their contracts.

The logic, though painful for those involved, is compelling: Why pay, say, $1 million for a home that may well be worth only a quarter of that amount in a year?

Then there are the amenities. Even the most respectable button-down business executive must now contend with baggage searches in order to enter any high-rise office block. Even the Chinese restaurants' ubiquitous deliverymen can advance no further than the lobby.

The subway system, much of it blocked by rubble, is an object lesson in frustration and, yes, fear. Everyone knows that the underground tunnels would be the perfect place to release a dose of nerve gas or virus, and there is also deep concern that the damaged retaining walls beneath the trade center site might give way and allow the waters of New York Harbour to come rushing in.

The daily hassles of New York life, onerous at the best of times, have become suddenly more so. As those departed brokerage firms have concluded, the internet age makes the entire world as close as the office next door. So why stay?

Unless Ferrer or party rival Mark Green or Bloomberg can cut the tax deals that will induce those increasingly frazzled businesses to remain, there will be nothing but inertia to stop them joining the exodus to the suburbs.

This dour view may be wrong. Perhaps, rather than an extended period of slow decline, the city will indeed bounce back. But listen to the voices and it's difficult to share the boosters' faith.

"I was born here and no bunch of fanatics is going to make me leave," the pampered wife of a well-known literary agent said over dinner at a popular, but these days empty, restaurant.

By the Kubler-Ross reckoning it was the classic stage two reaction of angry defiance.

"Unless there is another attack. If that happens, I don't want to leave but I guess we'll be looking at Scarsdale or Long Island."

And there it was, Kubler-Ross' endgame - surrender, acceptance and departure - all rolled into one.

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